Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

DELIVERY WOMAN

It has been a long day of intergalactic delivery, and I’m feeling a little boxed-in. Though I like the homey atmosphere of my ship’s small confines, about a week into a mission the air starts to smell like recycled sock.

When my Message Station Board lights up pink, I know it’s Brady, WordCalling. I’ve never met him, but he says he’s forty-three, and early on in our talks he sent a very promising five-second video of himself flexing his back muscles. Like me, Brady is an independent outer space cargo transporter. We are the truckers of the galaxy.

Yet our connection runs much deeper than this. The very first time he messaged me on SingleMingle (initially, it was a bit of a debate whether or not to look past his screen name of FluidTransfer69 and try to get to know the man within), I felt that Brady had to be a Sagittarius. That’s how well we clicked. And lo and behold, when I told him my suspicion, he admitted that while his birth month technically made him a Scorpio (my astrological enemy), he was born prematurely. His true sign is indeed the keeper of my star-charted soul.

Tonight we wax intellectual for a bit before getting flirty.

As always, I open myself to him completely.

With Brady clearly turned on by the parallel between our love and eternity, we talk until our conversation culminates physically, at which point Brady writes,

We’ve been chatting back and forth for several weeks now, although it seems like years because the cultivation of Our Love has been so rapid. He tells me that his face is badly scarred from a fuselage accident, and that because of this he fears my disappointment and is reluctant to meet me in person. I constantly assure him his appearance doesn’t matter, but he hasn’t yet been able to summon up the courage. Brady’s back and buttocks, however, are a source of self-pride—additional photo stills, he promises, are coming my way.

It’s always hard to wake from dreams where the universe has instated a monarchy consisting of myself as Queen and Brady as King. In my dreams Brady closely resembles a cut, muscular Jesus.

I roll out of bed to find that the frozen waste extrication unit has broken and the waste has melted. I begin my day by mopping the thaw. Because my mop sponge is fiercely rectangular, it cannot get around the tighter edges of the file cabinet and I must reserve that job for Q-tips.

Yet it is a brighter afternoon when I sit down to find that amongst various junk email pyramid schemes there is also a message from Brady. I open it and see a forwarded news release.

The story, indeed impressive, involves an ape both calling for help and pumping his owner’s stomach with charcoal after watching her attempt suicide for the third time. He is a helper-ape, assigned by the state in the absence of family funds for a more human in-home caretaker. The woman is ninety-four and deathly afraid of primates.

Yet what truly catches my eye is the story just below it. Justice Freeze, a cryogenic contractor largely employed by the government’s penal system, is going belly-up and holding a large auction. Several criminals whose permacapsules are programmed to not unlock for centuries are up on the auction block.

I am interested in one in particular. Below the notorious big-font names that will no doubt go into the home foyers of heavy-rock musicians, there is a smaller one, barely visible, ending a long string of nobodies.

My mother, Debbie “The Destroyer” Harlow.

Mother led a life of crime. Her real screw-up, the one that landed her 450 years, involved a large Guatemalan daycare facility and a hidden boon of cocaine. Either her instinct or information was off. The footage was replayed over and over again on universal broadcast the October of my ninth year of life: Mother, discharging a machine gun clip into a row of cribs. In court she claimed the cribs were empty, but the Guatemalan police said otherwise, and this was yet another strike in a long string of transgressions.

She also killed my father. He was a good man, but too talkative.

As I stare at the monitor, an antsy feeling begins to overtake me. Finally, against my better judgment, I sigh and program my ship towards the auction city’s coordinates.

Upon arrival I’m given a numeric paddle. I find it eerie the way the prisoners’ capsules are intermixed with used and defunct science equipment. Each capsule has a large number with a minimum bid written across the icy window in grease pen.

Lucky for me, Mother’s starting bid is quite low. Freelance outer space cargo running is a hit-or-miss trade, and this year in particular has been quite difficult. In September I contracted an antibiotic-resistant strain of trichomoniasis from a toilet seat in Goron, a dome community where I dropped off a payload of refurbished filtration equipment. A few months later my fuel gauge malfunctioned and I was stalled out in the middle of nowhere for several weeks until another ship happened by. The subsequent weight-loss that occurred during this time of hardship followed by my celebratory feasting upon rescue resulted in a bad case of the gout. Luckily, this final blow was tempered with meeting Brady. My empty glass became half-full.

I’m no delicate rose, but looking at all the frozen criminals, I start to wonder if this is such a good idea. The capsules are especially frightening. They’re dimly lit and humming like vending machines.

All the high-end infamous criminals were frozen, bearing menacing expressions. I wonder if they made these poses intentionally, like a funny face for a driver’s license photo. When people are frozen alive it becomes pretty clear what their true personality is. Most of the white-collar criminals have pained expressions, anywhere from discomfort to agony. A few look almost peaceful; one woman in particular has an extreme glow about her. I check the paperwork and see she’s been frozen for multiple homicides.

When I finally reach Mother, I’m a little taken aback. The frozen years have not been good to her. Technically, one doesn’t age while frozen, but she has clearly been through a lot. Her expression is wincing and concentrated, as if she’d been paused while taking an ardent dump. She also has what appear to be freezer-burn patches decorating her cheeks and forehead. These are especially prominent along her scalp, and look as though an irritating home-perm solution was left on far too long. Does hair freeze? Her mashed up hair resembles a matted pompadour. Overall it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere, but now and then I see a wisp quiver beneath the gust of the capsule’s internal fan.

The auction begins with the most expensive items, and I realize I’m in for a long day. I decide to check the mobile WordCall terminals to see if Brady is logged into the system. I’m quite nervous so I eat a few double-fudge squares and pray that he’s on—only his virtual presence could give me the strength to abstain from polishing off an additional 12-pak of Galaxy Bars.

As I see his screen name I sigh with relief, so hard that I fog up the screen and have to use my sweaty palm to remove condensation with more condensation. I marvel again at how quickly we were able to fall in love. It’s true—when I found “the one,” I just knew it.

FluidTransfer69: Hey, where u at? Missed our a.m. freak sesh.

Don’t get me wrong; Brady and I have discussed many profound topics, including capital punishment (he’s against), global warming, and slavery. But when it comes to the finer details of our personal lives, we just haven’t gotten there yet. Ours is an intense and steamy courtship with little room for conversation that doesn’t make at least minimal strides towards climax.

I lie.

Yet I underestimate Brady’s working knowledge of my psyche, his Sagittarius command of honesty that detects when something is amiss, especially with one he truly holds dear.

The pupils of his frown emoticon are like painful daggers to my heart. Here I am, deceiving the one I love, only to cause him agony. I decide I must come clean.

Clearly, any further delay of information is not possible. Brady needs the truth and only the truth, and as my job motto states, I Shall Deliver.

As I press “Enter,” I imagine this information beaming through light-years of distance to reach Brady. It’s a short but hard wait before I know relief.

By the time Mother is put onto the block, the more upright bidding citizens have long left the building. The man to my left smells vaguely of urine and keeps lifting his wig and scratching his scalp with the end of his paddle.

I am the first to call Mother’s bid at its minimum, and am challenged only once by an awkward but well-dressed teenager who has been making the second bid on everything and accumulating an impressive frozen army. As I raise him, anxiety floods me. In my head I’ve already accepted a projected scenario where he bids my mother up to an unaffordable price and I leave defeated, only to be arrested five years later for breaking into his pool house in an attempt, likely drunken, to reclaim her. Then his shiny cell phone goes off and he leaves.

I get my mother for minimal mark-up, about the cost of three days of work. That is, when there’s cargo work to be had, and when misfortune does not follow my delivery mission like a love-drunk puppy.

I decide I cannot just dive in and yell to Mother’s capsule Everything I’ve Been Wanting To Say. The comfort level has to raise, familiarity must be reestablished and achieved. As evening sets in, I boil an insta-broth and sip it in front of her.

Although it wasn’t easy to fit her capsule, 15x6 feet, into the 30x20 interior of my ship, I believe that ultimately it will prove to be a healing experience. I think, sometimes, that my whole life, this wandering around the universe, is really just an attempt to try and outrun her and my past. But now here she is—consuming a large amount of electricity and frozen solid just inches away from wherever I am to roam about the cabin.

The heat from my insta-broth melts the frost away from her digital lock, informing me that she has over 414 years left on her sentence. When (or if) she does finally wake, I will be so dead, and she will most likely have no idea that the majority of my adult life was spent in cohabitation with her physical being. Perhaps I’m fooling myself thinking that this is any kind of personal breakthrough. To say that she is emotionally unavailable is a bit of an understatement. But really, it’s my life I should concern myself with. Our relationship doesn’t have to be a two-way street.

When it’s time to meet Brady online, I throw a blanket over Mother’s capsule like it’s a parrot’s cage. My personal life should remain private. It’s been a long day, and I’m ready to lose myself to the gaping void of lust. At times I worry my relationship with Brady is too heavily dependent on the sexual, but tonight I’m grateful for its numbing opiate. Afterwards, when I’m about to sign off, Brady brings up Mother.

I fear disclosing this information may cause him to worry about a genetic bias towards psychosis on my end, but then I remember our previous bonding experience that day.

Naïve as this question is, I can’t help but wonder if this is his way of telling me that he soon wants to meet not only myself but also the family, to take our relationship to the next level.

I pause, pondering how much I should express to him. It’s healthy, I decide, to just say what I feel.

And suddenly, I see that it’s OK. That it will all be OK because I’m not in this alone. My feelings for Brady swell and I decide to express them in a humorous pun.

Pierre is Brady’s name for his penis.

And with that, Brady demonstrates his technical prowess by cutting and pasting a series of step-by-step instructions that could have Mother room-temperature by morning.

I strap into my sleepsak with a heavy dilemma. I, and perhaps I alone, am in a unique position to understand that Mother is, on many levels, a monster of unthinkable proportions.

Yet I’m also her daughter. Her daughter and her only child. If I were frozen, wouldn’t I want her to unthaw me if I were so capable? And what of second chances? What of personal growth and change? What of her realizing that it’s me, her little daughter, but arson, drug trafficking, homicide, sexual battery, and a variety of other mistakes caused her to miss my childhood and adolescence?

I leave the blanket on her capsule all through the night. The next morning, I meet Brady online, but I’m not interested in the hot-n-heavy. I have hard-hitting questions that need answers.

Was Brady right? Had I subconsciously been hoping that I would be able to bring her back to life all along?

I’m inclined to agree with him, although I’m not sure that using her command of martial arts to force a wooden spoon handle into my father’s jugular could rightly be labeled an imperfection.

We give each other kissing icons; I impulsively touch the screen when his name disappears.

I remember, kind of, the movie Frankenstein. Or maybe I’m making this up. But I think that when the creature comes to life, there are lots of subhuman moans and groans. Perhaps some running around and crashing into things.

There is no technical support hotline I can call for assistance with illegally opening my mother’s prison capsule, and we’re a few hours away from any medi-port. My greatest fear is that she’ll wake up startled and instinctually lash out at the first organic thing she senses, which will be me.

Simply opening the capsule is easy. When the door lifts up it’s quite theatrical due to the frozen smoke. I wonder if I should be recording this. It seems like something my mother, the new mellowed-out one that will take to bridge and cardigans, might want to watch alone and get a bit misty-eyed to on nights when Brady and I have gone somewhere romantic and timeless: here is where my daughter pulled me from the fog of purgatory. Here is where I achieved room temperature.

Mother’s expression and skin texture looked unseemly even through the frosted glass, but without any kind of cloudy filter, she is very, very grizzled. The veins in her face are prominent and green, with a slight purple tinge I can only describe as zombieish.

Suddenly a vague memory hits me of a time she made me siphon gasoline as a child—she dismissed my resultant oral sores, saying if I really wanted to feel some pain, I’d close an eleven inch knife wound up with gunpowder and a cigarette (she had done this in São Paulo, though I can’t remember the circumstances). Waking her up might be quite a mistake. My panic deepens as my eyes move towards her sharpened teeth. At least, I’ve always assumed she had them sharpened. Nature doesn’t seem fond of mixing 45° enamel inclines with mammary glands.

As the ship’s control panel lights glimmer and flick across the shiny arrowheads of her incisors, it’s hard not to feel like everything about her emanates a strong Do Not Touch vibe.

The reanimation directions are far more involved than just popping the door open, which I’m sure often had to be done for routine maintenance. Though I don’t know how much routine maintenance was given to my mother, seeing as her T-Zone appears to be blistered yellow with a thick layer of permafrost. A wave of pity overtakes me, and I know what I must do. This time, things will be different: I’m an adult, I have a wonderful boyfriend, and Mother will have to be grateful that I saved her from her sentence.

I proceed with caution, first tying her body up with a series of athletic tube socks, which I have an abundance of. Though I’m no slave to the work-out (in fact I don’t think I’ve ever, really, engaged in any type of cardiovascular activity beyond scrubbing) I love elastic. Perhaps due to the fact that I was not hugged or encased in warmth nearly enough as a child. Perhaps due to the fact that my non-sociopath parent was murdered by the non-non.

Eventually, the fluids start kicking. I do mean this literally. Restraining her was a good idea.

The legs are the first to return, followed by the upper-torso. There are lots of bubbles. The gases that came out of her have a smell somewhere between Clorox and broccoli. At first her body appears to be dancing, hippie-style in reckless abandon, too drugged out to allow for symmetry of movement and timing. These seizures then pick up the pace with chest undulations. There’s a small window of time when I become afraid she will short-circuit and leave me with only the smell of burnt hair and some additional emotional baggage.

She vomits several liters of a gelatinous maroon substance before speaking.

“You double-crossing prick,” she belches. “Give me back my magazine.”

By magazine, I know she is not referring to any sort of home interior journal.

“Mother,” I say, “it’s me. You’re safe. You don’t need any bullets. The year is 2045.”

Her eyes, perhaps, still have some ice crystals passing over the retina. Maybe all she can see is blurry light. She might even think that this is the afterlife, and I an angel.

Suddenly I feel her gaze lock upon me like the scope of a long rifle.

“It’s you? Jesus, you turned out homely. Let me see your rack.”

“Mother—”

With that she reaches out to physically explore my bosom. Realizing she’s restrained, she quickly bites through her cotton fetters with rodential flair.

“This place is a shithole.”

I can feel the age-old resentment beginning to boil as I watch her rooting around my tiny cabin, no doubt searching for instruments to fashion crude weapons from. When she opens my utensil drawer, she lets out a judgmental “tsk.”

“Maybe, Mom, I would live in a nicer place if I hadn’t gone to a government work-orphanage at the age of nine when you were incarcerated. Not just incarcerated, frozen. Beyond writing letters, even. Did you know that they didn’t even tell me you’d been frozen? For the longest time, I left mail for you on my nightstand, thinking the supervisors picked it up during our morning chemical showers. I’d get long letters back and it wasn’t until you started coming on to me in them and asking me to meet you in the boiler room that I realized Robby the Janitor had been stealing my outgoing mail and taking on your share of the correspondence.”

Mother has found my only pair of pantyhose (admittedly, I don’t dress to the nines much) and placed padlocks into each foot. She begins spiraling these around like nun chucks.

“Mother, no weapons. I mean it. I didn’t have to bring you back to life.”

This gets her attention. She comes over and places her fingers along my throat in a way that brings instant and absolute pain, along with the inability to move. “You’re getting too big for your britches.”

She then opens the refrigerator and eats for three hours straight. Around hour two I decide to go to bed. I don’t say a word about how the distracting light, the wasted power, and the flatulent sounds of plastic condiment containers spurting their last drops are keeping me from pleasant dreams. What I do say in my head—a telepathic whisper of sorts that I hope she will hear, considering the possibility that maybe being not dead but frozen for several years opened some window of her mind to the supernatural—is this: my britches are indeed so big, Mother. I’m a forty-three year old woman with a weakness for reconstituted fudge.

I wake to Mother (nude) holding a loofah scrub (mine) looking not so happy. She was frozen before the hydrogen ration card mandate and does not understand why the shower won’t operate. Since I cannot ask for additional ration cards to support a prematurely thawed felon, I’m forced to dip into my meager stash of them. She asks how long they’re for.

“Three minutes,” I warn. “Don’t get caught in the dry with a head full of bubbles.”

She hoists up an arm that appears to be covered with sawdust. “I’ve got more dead skin than you’ve got ugly. Give me another one of those things. Three minutes isn’t even long enough to sand my forehead.”

I tell her, “just this once,” then when I hear the water start I put all my remaining ration cards into a front-zip stomach purse designed to prohibit pick pocketing. I bought the purse for travel, specifically for when Brady and I will honeymoon in Rome.

While Mother’s in the shower, I sign on to let Brady know that I’ve unfrozen her.

I’m a sucker for simplicity and would rather not explain that since waking, all Mother has really done is fully deplete my living quarters and put me in a choke-hold.

That night I decide that if things are going to move forward emotionally with Mother, it is I who will need to instigate the healing process. I watch on as she uses my fold-down dinette table to practice punching through wood.

She needs no practice.

“Mother, when you killed Father, that really hurt me. Especially the having to watch it.”

“I didn’t tie you up and glue your eyes open.”

This is true. Mother has a way of making everyone else seem in the wrong.

“Did you miss me? All those years you were frozen?”

Mother’s left cheek is somewhat illuminated by the moon, which is visible across the windshield. She’s sweaty and her cheeks are pink with exertion. I watch as her expression remains unchanged while her fist sails through four solid inches of oak.

It occurs to me that we’re now the same age. In fact, she might be a little younger. Despite her discoloration from freezing, I have to admit that her features are beautiful. It’s not something she passed on.

“Mother? Because I missed you. Sometimes I was so mad at you that I told myself I didn’t miss you. I even swore that I hated you, but inside I knew that was never true, no matter how much I wanted it to be.”

“I was frozen, nitwit. You can’t miss people while you’re frozen.”

In my bunk I pull the covers up over my head and wonder if my relationship with Brady is strong enough to accelerate—to the point of me seeing his face, but also to us meeting and perhaps cohabitating.

Mother could maybe not come with me.

The next morning I pop the question to Brady.

I quickly peer over my shoulder to make sure Mother is still finishing her home tattoo. She’s deep in concentration over an electric toothbrush motor and a Bic pen.

We discuss logistics. Although I want to leave this afternoon, Brady has a biohazard run to finish and only one radioactive suit. We decide on Friday.

The truth is, good things do happen to good people; sometimes it just takes awhile. And bad people do get punished. Mother already got hers, sort of. She should’ve gotten it for longer but I wanted to give her a second chance.

The rest of the week proved to be quite a struggle. I managed to get through it only because I knew it would all be over soon, I in Brady’s protective embrace.

On Tuesday, incredulous that I wasn’t holding any hard drugs, Mother burnt my vinyl curtains to create a tar-like mixture she could huff. Once high, she insisted we have a series of home-Olympic strength competitions that included arm wrestling, leg locking, and kickboxing. These were followed by a medal ceremony in which Mother awarded herself the two remaining tin cans of food on board. I went to bed hungry. This was probably for the best because my stomach was already so full of swallowed blood.

Bored on Wednesday, Mother dislodged a ceiling panel and went up into the cabin’s airshaft. She emerged adorned with several pieces of apocalyptic jewelry she had fashioned from living rats.

Thursday was a delight of secret packing. Although most of my sparse possessions had been transformed into some type of weapon, I had been able to hold onto one pair of decent underwear, elastic still relatively sturdy, for my first meeting with Brady. That night I decided to set things as right with Mother as I could.

“Mother, I want you to know that despite all that’s happened, you’ll always be my mother, and I love you.”

She seemed to possibly absorb this. Her fingers fidgeted with her rattail necklace. “I can’t believe they did away with television ten years ago,” she said. “I really didn’t see that coming at all.”

I get up in the early hours of morning, dress, and start towards the exit pod. Suddenly the shadow of the doorway takes form and I feel a grave disruption in my breathing that gives way to unmistakable pain. Mother, wearing an eye patch donned for purely aesthetic reasons, is holding a homemade knife. As she pulls the blade from my chest, I see that it has been whittled from a tin pork-n-beans can. Its label is still partially on.

Knowing I have just minutes, perhaps seconds to live, I don’t dabble in the muck of blame or anger. Circle of life, I decide. Mother giveth, Mother taketh away. But I can’t live with Brady thinking that perhaps I’d gotten cold feet, or worse, never loved him at all. I use my last remaining strength to scrape towards the WordCall console.

To my surprise, it is already lit up. There is a message between us, except the words are not my own.

“Sorry to burst your bubble.” Mother hoists me over her shoulder and begins walking. “He’s a steady I met back in the pen, pre-freeze. Been in wait ever since for an opportunity to spring me. As a former felon, he wasn’t be allowed to buy my permacapusle, so when he found out I’d be going up for auction he decided to get to me through you.”

The room is starting to turn a dark shade of magenta, waving at the edges like a flag of silk. Mother hoists me down and then latches something around my wrists and neck. I realize I’m in the prison capsule.

Before closing the lid, she unzips the purse on my waist and removes all my shower ration cards. From the inside of the capsule, her voice sounds echoey and god-like.

“Don’t worry, I’m freezing you, not leaving you to die. It’s just a flesh wound. Albeit a deep one. I’m going to have to dump you somewhere that no one will find you for fifty years or so, long enough for me and Skinner, or Brady, or whatever you called him, to have a nice life together without you showing up to blow the whistle.”

With that, the cold smoke starts. It burns in a surprising way. The fact that this should not be happening to me, that Mother and my pretend boyfriend formerly known as Brady are bad people and I am not, doesn’t provide quite as much insulation from the pain as I might like. In fact, I am very cold, so cold that no one thing can be any different from another. My thoughts and my left arm are equal-sized chunks of ice. The small window of the capsule begins to frost over and I know this is my chance: this where I get to make the face that I will have until I wake. I decide to stick out my tongue. As if this painful freeze is just a snowflake I can catch and eat, as if my mother is just a bad medicine I can swallow.